In business parlance this would be a “virtual team”
“Stochastic terrorism” is the term I’ve seen for this before, and anti-abortion murders are the modern model.
Of course, the idea goes back much further. “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
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I am afraid this question will soon be answered by governments with speeches involving words like “surveillance” and “national security”.
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My take on this is that there is no short term, easy solution. Otherwise it would have been done already. The solution as i perceive it is addressing toxic masculinity, mental health and positive sex education as early as possible. You want kids growing up feeling like they can talk openly about their struggles and also not having to worry that they have to conform to an outdated view of masculinity.
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Education, you say? Pfft, it’ll never catch on… /s
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Not in the US at least.
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One thing that stood out to me on Twitter yesterday (I know, I know) is that most of the mainstream are unaware of the distinction between self-described incels and people who are merely bad at dating. And incels themselves are glad to conflate the two for the same reason Islamic terrorists are glad to publicly conflate themselves with the vast majority of peaceful Muslims: if the mainstream is tricked into arguing over whether to punish a large marginalized group, the predators can use the crowd for cover of their behavior. This tells me that one thing we need to do is, to use Cory’s favorite term, debullshitify that myth.
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*despairing laughter
Seems to be quite a Western trend. A distinct lack of education and minimal activities for the young. No wonder they get into trouble.
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Not only on Twitter. Just about any thread concerning incels on BoingBoing quickly becomes derailed into a debate on people who are bad at dating. For example this thread, half of which was pruned away for that reason:
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Something I’ve noticed WRT toxic masculinity is that even in left-wing, progressive spaces, there’s no–or very little–promotion of the things which are traditionally coded as feminine as being suitable/desirable for men.
It seems to me that if you look at the way gender expectations have changed over time, an increasing number of things which were previously “men only” have become acceptable for women. Conversely, most things which were traditionally “women only” have not become socially acceptable for men. Makeup, most kinds of women’s clothes, various hobbies and occupations.
And I think some people will read this and immediately want to say “What, why do men need more stuff? They already have all the privilege!” and to a great extent that’s true, but it overlooks something important. When the things which are regarded as “feminine” are still considered undesirable for men, it perpetuates the deeply rooted cultural prejudice of feminine things as inferior.
Most reasonably liberal, progressive people think it’s pretty normal for a woman to want to be treated the way a man is, but far fewer people would be comfortable with a man wanting to be treated the way a woman is.
And I think this discrepancy is one of the components of the superiority complex which parasitises modern masculinity: even a lot of feminist writing (not all, by any means, but a non-trivial quantity) boils down to an exhortation that women should have all the things that men have, without any attempt to encourage men to see the value of the things which are currently considered “womanly”, and this only helps encourage misogynists in their belief that masculine things are superior and feminine things are inferior.
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Was that Nixon? I thought that was J. Edgar Hoover? Probably both, actually.
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Are distinct lack of education and minimal activities for the young distinctly western, or the worst option? Good education and plenty of activities (other than grinding labor) for the young seems like a more common combination in the west than in most of the world. Also, the “hikikomori” phenomenon has been well known in Japan for a while, and that’s about as far east as you can get. The justification for calling this a “western” trend seems pretty thin.
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That’s why I need to find the quote. I know someone said it, but I thought it was Nixon (but not with 100% certainty).
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A real problem, even here.
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I’m merely saying “Western” because that’s my experience, and British in particular.
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It was during the Nixon era for sure, and that’s when Hoover really ramped up COINTELPRO in earnest, and that was primarily used against the Panthers. I do know that Hoover said that they were the most dangerous internal threat to the US. They both really feared the Panthers, though, especially their community outreach, because that did more to improve the Panthers standing in black communities across the country.
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I guess I just never assumed they were emotionally immature. I like My Little Pony. But I guess I like it enough to be disappointed when my child wanted to watch the episodes out of order, disrupting the storyline, but not enough to actually watch the episodes I missed…
Thanks for that. I don’t know what I’ve never thought of anti-abortion murders when thinking of these groups.
In that particular situation I think it’s easy to see the links between this approach and our popular mythology around of organized crime. The mob boss says, “I’d hate it if something were to happen to that guy” and he’s dead the next morning. What do we consider a fair comment that some crazy person used as a launching pad and what do we consider to be actually just a message in a code.
It’s hard to think in the story (I assume at least the famous line was embellished by a writer after the fact) of King Henry II that he wasn’t literally ordering Thomas Beckett killed. When certain alt-right darlings mentioned people on their twitter accounts they were ordering death/rape threats against those people. Some anti-abortion groups put up not-even-veiled hit lists of doctors. Trump’s “joke” was, to me, more like a threat, but death threats are illegal too.
It’s crazy that we act like we can’t do anything about any of this. Imagine what slippery slope we would start down if we denied people their right to publicly verbally attack specific transgender people just because every time they do so the targets of their verbal attacks then become targets of physical attacks or death threats. How dystopian!
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So far unmentioned, but I think there’s also a significant overlap with the quantifiable increase in societal loneliness reported by a disproportionately large number of the most recent few generations. A sizeable percentage of those affected seem to go rotten by going incel. I’m not saying they just need a girlfriend, but perhaps the decline in offline companionship exacerbated by the isolation of increasingly exclusive online social lives is a contributing factor that’s only intensified by an individual’s ostracization due in part to physiological or personality handicaps.
Tl;Dr - addressing the rising loneliness problem, particularly among youth, might help some.
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You do know that some of us do that, but we are hated more than any feminists who don’t because we “want to destroy masculinity” or some bullshit. Toxic masculinity doesn’t want men to be able to wear a dress without criticism, it wants the opposite, that no man (or trans feminine person) should be able to wear a dress without getting abuse and violence.
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